


we become the flowers

by Rivran



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Corpse Bride (2005) Fusion, Angst, Crack Treated Seriously, M/M, Sort Of, also you hear about how he died, its tagged Major Character Death because one of them starts off dead, oh also homophobia doesn’t exist because I say so, sorry about that, thats right lads it’s a corpse bride au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-25
Updated: 2021-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-27 02:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30115518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivran/pseuds/Rivran
Summary: After a disaster of a wedding rehearsal, Anthony J Crowley, reluctant groom, wanders into the woods to perform his vows.The Corpse Bride AU you didn’t know you needed.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	we become the flowers

**Author's Note:**

> hey folks! i’m back with something pretty different from my usual fare. the description says Corpse Bride AU, but really it’s more like a fusion? anyway it definitely doesn’t follow the plot of either corpse bride or good omens. enjoy!

“Crooooowleeeey!”

He winced and flattened himself against the wall.

“Open the door!” The brass knob rattled against the wood. “We know you’re in there, Crowley.”

“Fine,” he relented. The door swung open.

“We come with good news, Crowley,” leered Hastur. “You’ll be married next week.”

“What?”

“You heard him,” hissed Ligur.

“Well, it’s news to me. Bit rude not to ask me about my own wedding, isn’t it?”

“We don’t need to ask you, _little brother_.”

“Think of the good of the family, Crowley.”

“Well, if it’s for your good, how can I possibly say no?”

“Good,” said Hastur. “The rehearsal is tomorrow at seven. Don’t be late.” The door clicked shut with a coffinlike finality.

* * *

“How dare they,” he grumbled. The forest around him glowed red with the sunset. “Stupid bloody rehearsal. Why do I have to memorize the words? I obviously don’t mean it. Just look at me.” He kicked a fallen log. “Imagine the wedding, for God’s sake.”

“With this hand, I will lift your sorrows,” he recited. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? And ‘your cup will never empty, for I will be your wine’? We’re not even Catholic.” He flung an arm out, determined to act the dramatic part now that he’d started. “With this candle, I will light your way in darkness,” he declared. The ring shone in the sunset. “And with this ring, I ask you to be mine.”

He took a bow. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Just a gentleman here, I’m afraid,” said a voice behind him.

Crowley whirled around on one heel and lost his balance. He swayed in place for a moment. The ground came rushing up to meet him.

His head smacked into something hard, and the sunset finally went dark.

* * *

“Oh, dear.” Somebody was fretting loudly above Crowley. He cracked one eye open, then closed it against the brightness. “Oh, good, he’s awake,” said the same voice.

“Barely,” he mumbled.

“He’s still soft,” exclaimed a different voice.

“Shhh.”

“Will someone please explain what the fuck is going on?” Crowley opened his eyes again. “Oh, I’m going to regret that.”

Four children stared him down.

“Holy shit, he’s alive!” shouted the child with blonde hair.

“Adam!” chided the first voice, the one Crowley recognized. A hand appeared in front of Crowley’s face.

He grabbed at it, sitting up and groaning. “Course I’m alive, what kind of—”

Crowley froze.

He was in a busy pub. It was busy, in the sense that he was surrounded by people. But these weren’t like any kind of people he had ever seen. The children to whom he’d lost the staring contest? Emaciated. Clean white bones poked through their ratted clothing. A nearby woman had no flesh on one arm and only half a cheek. The man who’d helped him up was just as decrepit as the others, though he was better dressed.

There was only one sensible course of action left.

Crowley screamed.

He staggered upright.

“Give him space, please,” asked the man. The group of corpses backed away.

The back of the pub opened into an alleyway. Crowley ran blindly through the door. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he muttered as he ran. He collapsed atop a crate. “I’ve gone mad. Haven’t I?”

He heard someone approach him. “It’s quite alright, my dear boy,” the man reassured Crowley, with a pat on his shoulder. “Happens to everyone.”

Crowley buried his face in his hands. “This is insanity. There’s no such thing as zombies.”

“Well, I should hope so! Wouldn’t it be rude if someone else stole your body?”

Crowley looked up. “What.”

“Oh, where _are_ my manners?” exclaimed the man. He looked genuinely sheepish. “My name is Aziraphale. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Crowley,” said Crowley automatically. They shook hands — one warm, one cold.

“Would you like some wine?”

“Gladly.” He took the wine and drank straight from the bottle. It wasn’t great wine, but it was enough to let him process the night’s events.

“I’m going to assume,” he began, “that I haven’t actually gone insane. This is all real, I’m in Hell, though I don’t know how I got here, et cetera. Right?”

“Mostly. This isn’t really Hell, not like you think it is, but the rest is true. And I brought you here when you knocked yourself out in the forest.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Would you have preferred to be left in the woods on your own? At night?”

“Fair’s fair. Better here than there, I guess.”

“You’re handling the afterlife surprisingly well, given that you haven’t died yet,” Aziraphale noted.

“Honestly? This is par for the fucking course.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow.

“My brothers are Satanists,” he explained.

“Ah. Religious types.”

“As much as Satanists can be, yeah. They’re very…” He searched for the right word. “…dedicated, I guess.”

“I see. My family were all Catholic, when I was alive.”

“And you?” Crowley knew this was a personal question, but he _had_ just declared his wedding vows to a corpse, so the normal rules of conversation were right out the window by this point.

The corpse in question shrugged. “I did it for the appearances, mostly. Always wondered about some bits, but of course it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

“True.”

“And what about you? You certainly look the part.”

“Nah, s’just a style. And wearing bright colors makes me look like a fucking corpse,” he complained. “Oh, that was tasteless, wasn’t it.”

Aziraphale smiled, or at least Crowley was pretty sure he was smiling. “Figure of speech, I understand.”

Silence fell between them.

“So you’re probably wondering about the wedding vows,” Crowley blurted out.

“Oh yes, I’m dying to know.”

“First of all,” he began, “Apparently I got engaged, but I only found out about it yesterday. Wedding rehearsal was today and it was about as big of a disaster as it could ever be. I ran off into the woods, started ranting to the trees, then you walked in just in time to catch the monologue.”

“Surely it wasn’t that bad of a rehearsal?”

“I set his mother on fire.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“…deliberately?”

“No! I was trying to light the bloody candle and it fell out of my hand, that’s all. It definitely did set her on fire, though.”

Aziraphale visibly winced. “That is… not ideal, I’ll give you that.” He paused. “You don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about your marriage.”

Crowley snorted. “You don’t say. I hate my fiancé’s entire family. They’re a bunch of church-crazy bastards. They keep trying to run me and my family out of town. God knows why my brothers arranged the stupid marriage in the first place.”

“And your fiancé?”

“Ugh, don’t even get me _started._ He’s such a wanker. His name is Michael, and it sounds normal, right? Then you find out that his whole family is named after bloody angels. They’re so _pretentious._ And the rest of them only get worse!”

“You know, I think I’m familiar with the family.”

“I’m sorry for you. They’re horrible. You’re too nice for them.” Crowley finished the last of the wine in the bottle. “You’re like… a _real_ angel, ‘specially compared to that lot.” He would’ve liked to punctuate his statement with a dramatic flop backward, but he was still sitting on the crate. A grumpy slouch would have to do.

“You must be tired,” Aziraphale observed after a moment.

“Yeah, I should be going back. Not sure how, though.”

“You could stay here. There’s room.”

“Ehhh, I dunno.”

“It won’t kill you, my dear boy. Just the one night. You’ll be fine.”

Crowley yawned. “Yeah. All right.”

* * *

Crowley had woken up in a fair amount of strange places before, but a dead man’s spare coffin had not been one of them. It had been a shockingly comfortable bed, even if he had knocked his elbows against the sides every time he stretched. 

“You’ll have to go see Anathema if you want to get home,” Aziraphale had told him. “I can show you there if you like. Anathema used to be a witch, but now she’s really more of a librarian. She collects memories, mostly,” he chatted as they walked.

So that was how Crowley had ended up on his own inside a strange library. Aziraphale had left him with a “so sorry, my dear boy, but I’ve got errands to run and they’re quite time-sensitive, you understand”.

“He’s probably found some new burial ground. Off to rifle through some poor bastard’s grave goods and check for books, I assume. Anyway. Hi, I’m Anathema Device,” said the librarian.

“Pleasure,” Crowley replied.

The librarian grinned a wide, toothy smile, although her face didn’t have any other options. It didn’t have anything but bones. She steepled fleshless fingers atop the weathered desk. “So. What brings you here? Clearly you’re still alive, so you don’t have a death memory to want to revisit.”

He took a steadying breath. “No. I…” He stopped. An idea had just occurred to him. “I want to see Aziraphale’s memory.”

If the skeleton had had an eyebrow, she would have raised it. “That’s unusual. Death memories are very private, you know.”

“I do know,” he lied, “but please, show me.”

“Your funeral.” Anathema shrugged. “Just a minute.” She slipped out of the chair with a surprising amount of agility for someone with no muscles. Her bones clacked as she walked. “Here,” she said, reappearing in front of Crowley. An orange firefly rested on the tip of her bony finger. “Take it.”

Crowley extended his hand to the firefly. It crawled to rest on him. He blinked and found himself in a very different library.

“Aziraphale?” he called softly. The place was empty of people, as far as he could tell, though it was hard to tell through all the books. “Anyone here?”

Something rustled. Crowley picked his way through the bookstacks.

Aziraphale was in bed, sleeping. The bed was completely hidden among the stacks.

Crowley crept closer. “Aziraphale.” He poked him in the shoulder. His hand passed straight through.

 _I see,_ he thought. _Now he’s alive and_ I’m _the ghost._

With no other options, Crowley had no choice but to sit and wait. He didn’t have to wait long — something cracked in the other room. He tried to get up and investigate, but the door refused to open.

The crackling noise grew louder. Crowley dimly realized that the room was steadily heating. The green paint cracked and peeled from the door. Something hissed.

Flames crept through the door’s edges.

The house was well and truly burning. Aziraphale was trapped in a windowless room.

“Oh my God,” he gasped. “He didn’t — I didn’t — oh, God.”

“I tried to warn you,” Anathema muttered. She rested one bony hand on his shoulder. He appreciated the contact. “Look, we might be dead, but dying still isn’t a pleasant subject. It sucks, you know? And we have better things to talk about, usually. So don’t you dare say anything to Aziraphale about what you saw,” she warned. “He’s happy here.”

“Why would I remind him? What kind of asshole do you think I am?”

She leveled a hollow glare at him.

“Fine, you’re right. I won’t say a word about it.”

“Good.” She glanced at the clock on her desk. “If you want to be home in time for lunch, we should start sending you back now. I’ll have to modify some of my haunting spells to make sure you get to keep your body.”

“I get to… _what_?”

* * *

Crowley returned to the land of the living with very little fanfare. He strolled out of the woods and back to his home like he was simply returning from a very, very long walk through the forest.

“Where the hell have you been?” Hastur snapped.

“Er, the forest,” said Crowley. “Got lost last night. Must’ve fallen asleep, you know how it is.”

“Well, it’s a damned good sight you’re back. The stupid town crier was shouting about you all day till we shut him up.” Ligur grinned.

Crowley winced. He’d liked listening to him.

“The gossip is still spreading like a wildfire, though. We’ve moved up the wedding to tomorrow. Don’t you fucking dare be late.” They walked out of the room and slammed the door. Crowley heard the lock click. He was alone.

“Fuck,” he said to himself.

His mind raced, though that wasn’t a new development. Thoughts rolled around the inside of his skull like marbles around a roulette wheel.

_Rumours spreading like wildfire. Huh, fire. Like the one that killed Aziraphale. I wonder what happened to that house after he died. Like that bookshop that burned down last summer. What was that place called?_

The roulette wheel stopped spinning.

“Oh, my God.”

* * *

Crowley walked through the darkened streets, searching for a building he hadn’t visited in a long time. There had once been a little-used bookshop on a busy street corner. Now, though, the structure was a blackened husk of its former glory. Red brick gave way to soot-stained wood, which itself disappeared into the air around the walls.

“Oh, angel,” he muttered. “What happened?”

He picked through the wreckage. Pages with crinkled edges still scattered the ground. Most of the interior was nothing but rubble. One green book peeked out from under the ash. He bent down to lift it. His heart beat loudly in his ears. He stood up, bumping his shoulder into a wooden post. It looked like the remains of a doorway.

Something crunched in the ceiling above him.

He looked up.

The post had shifted when he hit it. Cracks spread across the wooden rafters. He watched the gaps spread wider. His heart pounded, faster. He retreated. His back was pressed to the brick wall.

Above him, something metallic snapped. Nails bent and popped loose. Another heartbeat passed. Moonlight glowed through the widening gaps in the ceiling.

A final heartbeat.

The moonlight disappeared.

**Author's Note:**

> chapter two coming soon!


End file.
